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MN: So when you got to the Colorado River, did you camp out there or what did you do out there?

YK: Oh, no, we had to come back the same day. [Laughs] So it's only about five miles away.

MN: That's kind of far walking, though, in the desert, right?

YK: Yeah, but it was level.

MN: So did you fish out there?

YK: Did we what?

MN: Did you go fishing out in the Colorado River?

YK: Oh, no.

MN: You know, I've heard about these dust storms at Poston. Can you describe those to me?

YK: Oh, yeah, the dust storms, you could see it coming from miles away. It'd just be a gray, and from ceiling, I mean, from the ground to way up would be this high, gray area coming. Then it would hit and it would be very windy. And then the barracks being wood, particularly being raised up, the wind would get underneath and come up through the space in the boards. And so we'd get all kind of dust in the room, so we had to clean up afterwards. But it didn't happen that often, we'd have it, I recall, about three or four of 'em. Of course, I was only in Poston for about a year and a half.

MN: Now you were young, so you didn't have to work, but can you briefly tell me what jobs your older sibling had? Like Tadao, what did he... you said he worked in the mess hall.

YK: Yeah. Tadao worked in the mess hall. Hideo, because he could drive, he drove the truck, the watering truck that sprinkles water on the roads, because otherwise it would become very dusty. And then Tom worked on the farm, there was a farm nearby where they were raising guayule plants which they were making rubber out of.

MN: You know, I was really surprised to learn about that, the guayules.

YK: Guayule, yeah.

MN: I thought Manzanar was the only one that did that, that cultivated guayule for the rubber.

YK: Yeah, I wasn't aware of it, but later my brother told me, oh, yeah, he did that.

MN: What about your dad? What did he do?

YK: Well, my dad, of course, he was too old to do much of anything, so he would just sit around with the other old men and lament about "what the government was doing to us," and how he had lost everything. So he was pretty bitter about the whole thing.

MN: Was your mother too busy with those younger sisters to work?

YK: Yeah, she didn't work either.

MN: Now, movies. Were there movies shown in Poston?

YK: Yeah, once in a while they would show movies in the middle of the camp in the big firebreak. And so you had to sit on the ground, dirt, or people would bring towels or blankets and so forth and we would sit on gallon cans and things like that. And they would have first the newsreel, a little bit about the war, and then they'd have a Flash Gordon Series where Flash Gordon would be going on and all of a sudden he'd get into an impossible situation, and then the film would say, "Tune in next time." So we had to wait 'til the next session. And then we kids didn't really stay around for the main movie. But that was about once a week or something like that.

MN: So you know when it got really cold when you were watching the movies, how did you keep warm?

YK: Well, in Poston it didn't get warm... I mean, it didn't get cold. It was pretty hot. We were out in the desert, basically. So we never worried about getting cold.

MN: I know that some of the farmers recruited the camp people to work on the farm, contract laborers. Did your brothers go out for that?

YK: Oh, yeah, my brother Hide and Tom, there was a call from the Utah Sugar Beets Growers that they didn't have enough labor and the sugar beets were rotting 'cause nobody could pick 'em. So they did get people to volunteer from the camp to go work. And they were paid much more, because the wages in the camp were fourteen dollars a month for regular jobs, and then if you were a teacher or doctor, you got sixteen or eighteen dollars a month. And so by going to pick (beets), my mother didn't want them to go out, but they said, oh, no, they'll be back shortly after they pick 'em, so they went and came back. And then after that, my brother Tom was able to go back east to college again. But, of course, from there, about that time, in 1943 I guess, they had rated all, up to then, all Japanese as being 4-A, not eligible for the draft, but then they changed it all to 1-A. And so my brother Tom was drafted out of the university, and my brother Hide was drafted right out of camp. So my father was further angry because now he had three sons in the army, and here we're in camp, and then, too, it was rumored that those who were going in the army would be put on the front lines against the Germans and used as cannon fodder and may never come back. So then came the notorious questionnaire, "loyalty questionnaire."

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.